Advancements in science and medicine affected every aspect of Renaissance life. Although many fields of scientific investigation, such as physics and chemistry, did not yet exist as such, the 15th and 16th centuries witnessed extraordinary developments in astronomy, mathematics, optics, botany, and anatomy. Ancient Greek scientific texts preserved through Arabic sources and edited by medieval scholars were studied throughout the Renaissance, then compared with newly discovered Greek texts. Renaissance editors of the ancient treatises thus drew upon several resources for new scholarly treatments. Individuals studying scientific topics began to combine medieval methods with more advanced ideas. Allopathic and homeopathic medical remedies might involve the application of new instruments and techniques, especially toward the end of the 16th century. New mathematical knowledge, for example, in triangulation, led to better scientific instruments for surveying and navigation. Both the reduction compass and the proportional compass were invented during this era, and the magnetic compass benefited from William Gilbert’s (1544-1603) work on magnetism.
The Renaissance study of natural history comprised many areas of science, including botany and geology. The general study of nature as a whole was called both natural philosophy and natural science (scientia is the word for knowledge in Latin). Deriving chiefly from the works of Aristotle, natural philosophy was split into two schools, one more theoretical and the other more practical. Medicine and anatomy, for example, fell into the latter group. Some of the arguments and conflicts among Renaissance scholars involved in the study of natural philosophy were caused by advocacy of “book learning” versus experience in the field. The best scientific minds of the Renaissance used both.
Astronomical discoveries of the Renaissance were momentous in that the Earth was no longer the center of the universe by the early 17th century. This repositioning of the world itself rocked the foundations of all scientific thought. Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) disproved the Ptolemaic geocentric (Earth-centered) universe. He did not permit his book De revolutionibus orbium calestium (On the revolutions of the heavenly orbs) to be published until shortly before his death, because such an opinion was potentially heretical; in fact, the Catholic Church strongly discouraged any teaching of the Copernican system. Medieval cosmology, the study of the world in relation to the heavens, had to be rewritten by the end of the 16th century. The genius who did so was Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), whose major contributions are beyond the scope of the present book. We should note that his famous experiment of dropping objects from the leaning campanile of Pisa may never have happened; by 1609, however, he knew that the speed of a falling body varies according to the time of its fall, not the distance. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), as did Galileo, did most of his important astronomical work after 1600. Earlier he was influenced by the work of Copernicus and studied with Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) in Prague. Kepler’s Mysterium cosmo-graphicum (Cosmographic mystery, 1596) supported Copernicus’s heliocentric system. He also correctly defined gravity as a force of mutual attraction among celestial bodies.
World History
